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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on November 30, 2008
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2009 4(1):85-92; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn042
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© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the originalwork is properly cited.

Saving for the future self: Neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting

Hal Ersner-Hershfield, G. Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson

Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Despite increases in the human life span, people have not increased their rate of saving. In a phenomenon known as ‘temporal discounting’, people value immediate gains over future gains. According to a future self-continuity hypothesis, individuals perceive and treat the future self differently from the present self, and so might fail to save for their future. Neuroimaging offers a novel means of testing this hypothesis, since previous research indicates that self- vs other-judgments elicit activation in the rostral anterior cingulate (rACC). Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we predicted and found not only individual differences in rACC activation while rating the current vs future self, but also that individual differences in current vs future self activation predicted temporal discounting assessed behaviorally a week after scanning. In addition to supporting the future self-continuity hypothesis, these findings hold implications for significant financial decisions, such as choosing whether to save for the future or spend in the present.

Keywords: temporal discounting; saving behavior; self vs other differences; cortical midline structures

Correspondence should be addressed to Hal Ersner-Hershfield, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, E-mail: haleh{at}stanford.edu

Present address: G. Elliott Wimmer, Department of Psychology, Columbia University

Received June 22, 2008. Accepted October 25, 2008.


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